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Kevin: Panel discussion on Education of the Entrepreneurial Journalist. Jeff Jarvis as moderator. Rafat Ali, Editor/Publisher, ContentNext Media
Phil Balboni, President and CEO, GlobalPost.com
John Harris, Editor in Chief, Politico.com
Geneva Overholser, Director, School of Journalism, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
John Thornton, Chairman, The Texas Tribune.org -
Kevin: Showing my age, I've been thinking and writing about media convergence for coming up on two decades. However, it finally looks like it might happen. "Steve Plunkett explains how milestones such as Project Canvas will bring together broadcast television and online media." He says, "While the hybrid model has been discussed for some time, this year is when it is actually going to meet the public. Analysts are predicting that 20% of televisions sold in Europe in 2010 will be internet enabled. Combine this with the fast-growing range of digital receivers and games consoles that are starting to offer television and video content delivered via broadband and it becomes clear that a new model is emerging."
Monthly Archives: February 2010
Data security vs agility and cost
Third party social media tools really are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, they allow you to get up and running almost instantaneously for little or no money, but on the other hand you have no data security or guarantee of uptime.
I’m reminded of this dichotomy by the recent closure of a number of music blogs by Google’s Blogger service. Despite the fact that these blogs were all operating legitimately and within the law, Google removed their content from Blogger without either a warning or an opportunity to back up. This appears to be bad behaviour from Google, but they are not alone. Yahoo! has a track record of closing down Cinderella services without much of a by-your-leave, resulting in confused and unhappy users whose data has been lost forever. And, of course, there was the catastrophic server meltdown at Ma.gnolia, a Delicious.com rival, which resulted in their entire bookmark repository being lost.
Whether it’s a company targeting a few users, closing down underachieving services, or suffering massive data loss, there is just no guarantee that the information you put online is still going to be there in the morning.
So does this mean that corporate information should never be entrusted to third party sites? Not at all. Firstly, it’s not always possible to run your own internal version of a third party tool, and often it’s not even desirable. You could never replicate the networked nature of a third party social network, for example.
Sometimes you can install software, such as WordPress, on your own servers, but if your IT department is maxed out or uncooperative, you may be forced on to WordPress.com instead. There could be a significant cost to the business if you have to wait months for your own installation to be set up and for your project to get started, in which case the hosted option becomes the most viable option.
The answer? Your social media tools should, where possible, be regularly backed up just as with your own servers. Recovery of your social media presence should be at the top of your disaster recovery plan, if only because if something serious happens to your company or any of your other data, your blog could be a key communications channel. (This is also a good reason not to host your own blog on the same servers as your main website, by the way! If everything else goes down, you need to have some way to communicate with the outside world.)
Perceived barriers to wiki adoption
Alan Porter writes a great blog post – one I wish I’d written! – over on Ars Technica examining some of the perceived barriers to wiki adoption that he has come across. He says:
As I continue to research and write my upcoming book on wikis, I keep hearing one word over and over again. That word is “BUT” (complete with all-caps), as in, “I would like to use a wiki, BUT…” or “We tried using a wiki, BUT…”
What follows is usually an excuse for why the speaker feels that a wiki isn’t a worthwhile tool for collaboration in his or her environment. I use the word “excuse” deliberately, because rarely does anyone articulate an actual business reason, such as a lack of need. When I ask deeper questions, I invariably find that the objection isn’t to the wiki technology itself, but instead to the concept of collaborative authoring and a perceived loss of control over the content.
Porter’s post is an excellent view into the cultural and technical barriers people erect in order to isolate themselves from change. Cultural excuses include:
- We tried one once and no one used it
- The cost/benefit ratio is too high
- I’m too busy doing actual work to try anything new
- It’s overwhelming, and I don’t know where to start
- If my management doesn’t care, why should I?
- It won’t be accurate
- I prefer meetings
Technical excuses include:
- I need to learn a mark-up language
- Search doesn’t work
- It’s a black hole
- It isn’t like (name your favorite application here)
- It’s a security nightmare
Porter debunks each myth with great care, and then poses a set of questions that everyone should ask themselves before they embark on a wiki project.
The whole post reminds me of the Why Don’t You/Yes, But… Game from Transactional Analysis where one person offers the other help, but that help is rejected every time with an excuse. I have certainly observed managers (even quite senior ones) playing Why Don’t You/Yes, But… around social technology, particularly wikis and blogs. Let me write you a sample script:
Manager: We need to improve collaboration and capture knowledge.
Consultant: Why don’t you use a wiki?
M: Yes, but it’ll take us 18 months to get it through IT.
C: Why don’t you use a hosted wiki?
M: Yes, but then our data won’t be secure.
C: Why don’t you create a regular back-up schedule?
M: Yes, but that’s too difficult.
C: Why don’t you go with a vendor that backs up for you?
M: Yes, but that’s too expensive.
C: Why don’t you install open source software on an under-the-desk server, Trojan Mouse style?
M: Yes, but if IT ever find out, they’ll kill me.
As Wikipedia says, “”Why Don’t You, Yes But” can proceed indefinitely, with any number of players in the [Manager] role, until [the Consultant’s] imagination is exhausted, and she can think of no other solutions. At this point, [the Manager] “wins” by having stumped [the Consultant].”
Every time I have found myself embroiled in this game, the project has stalled, often before anything has happened. It’s so easy to think of reasons why something won’t work and much harder to think of ways to make sure it does. And when I say Manager in the above example, I don’t just mean middle managers; I have played this game with CxOs, people you would think could just say, “Make it so”, people who are supposed to be the ones setting their company’s technology agenda.
We have to recognise that many companies behave like dysfunctional mega-personalities, with each member of the collective reinforcing each other’s bad behaviour. We can’t always use logic and evidence to deal with people playing these games, but instead must draw from other sources of inspiration such as psychology in order to understand how to move things forward. And that’s easier said than done!
links for 2010-02-13
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Kevin: Another type of 'social payment' programme like Kachingle that allows people to pay a flat rate every month and then spread that money to contribute to the creation of content they like.
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Kevin: Phil Balboni from GlobalPost, John Harris of Politico, Rafat Ali of ContentNext (paidContent, et al), John Thornton of the Texas Tribune and Geneva Overholser of USC Annenberg all answer the question: : What is the one skill or approach that journalists need to have, and develop, right now? Business savvy. Entrepreneurial drive. 'Find your distinctive value'. Expertise. Collaboration and openness. (I like the last two)
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Kevin: An interesting call for a "Google newsroom". It's an article in translation so it's a bit difficult to understand in places, but my take away was rather than have a "bi-medial" newsroom with journalists having to focus on the web and on print that there were greater possibilities with a web-focused newsroom with focus on aggregation, curation, data and original reporting. It's an interesting idea, and I think it's another reaction to the mixed record of print-digital newsroom integration.
CSWE Roundup – 12 Feb 10
Oops, forgot to do my Computer Weekly: The Social Enterprise round-up last week, so here are two week’s worth of links for you.
Asymmetry: The problem with social networks
Shoot the alpha males
Does your personality influence how you use the web?
Listening – Connecting – Publishing
IntraTeam 2010
How important is Twitter to your blog’s traffic stats?
Report: Pew’s Social Media and Young Adults
Report: Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2010
Everything you need to know about comments
Google Buzz: A user testing fail?
Enjoy!
Google Buzz: A user testing fail?
Yesterday i wrote a long piece about Google Buzz over on my own blog, Strange Attractor. The long and the short of it is that Google has released a Twitter-clone that is embedded in Gmail. Various privacy concerns rapidly came to light which resulted in quite a few concerned blog posts from various quarters.
Once alerted to these concerns, Google immediately addressed some of them, although not everyone is convinced that it has gone far enough to correct the problems. Jessica Dolcourt has written a detailed set of instructions for how to fully disable Buzz for those unhappy with its intrusion into their inbox.
On the one hand, I’m not at all surprised that Google could mess this up so badly. Whilst a brilliant company from an engineering standpoint, it has a history of not really understanding people particularly well. When it does attempt social applications, it tends to do them clumsily.
Most of the stuff that was (and is) wrong with Google Buzz is obvious right from the get-go. A small user test with a handful of people would have picked it up. I wonder if Google did any user testing at all with Buzz, or whether they did it with people who work at Google and therefore, dare I say it, probably don’t think the way we do. Had they reached out to wider user community I think they would have rapidly discovered that Buzz made people feel squicky and that privacy was a serious concern.
We do know that Google does testing. They famously “couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better.” The question is, do they do user testing, and do they do it right? The mistakes made by Google Buzz would indicate that good user testing is not used uniformly across the business.
Google Buzz: Not fit for purpose
Please see update at bottom of post!
There has been, ahem, quite a bit of buzz about Google Buzz since they started rolling it out across the Gmail network a few days ago. I first saw an invitation to it when I logged into my inbox yesterday evening. Being curious, I accepted Google’s invitation to try it out, but fairly rapidly started to think that perhaps it was a bad idea.
My problems with Buzz are twofold: Firstly, it sits in Gmail, both as a menu item under my inbox and as live messages in my inbox. Secondly, there are some serious privacy implications that Google appear to either have ignored or not thought about. Either explanation is a poor show, frankly.
Buzz off out of my inbox!
I have written and spoken before about the problem with email, but for those of you unfamiliar with my views I shall summarise: Email is causing significant problems for people, not just because of the volume of email we get these days but because dopamine circuits in our brain encourage us to seek new information and cause us to check our email more often than we realise. Every time we check email, we waste about 64 seconds getting back into doing what we were doing before. Some people check email every 5 minutes. That’s an 8-hour day each week that we waste in mental limbo. Email is a significantly counter-productive tool yet it’s our default for almost all communications.
By adding in a new source of random reward – Buzz – Google have made their inbox even more addictive and unproductive. Not only do you have a new unread Buzz messages count to lure you into checking and rechecking, Buzz also tangles up Buzz replies with your email in your email inbox. Whilst that may seem sensible from an engineering point of view, or for someone whose inbox is quiet or beautifully organised, for me and the many people like me for whom inbox is a daily struggle, this is a disaster. I just do not need extra fluff filling up my inbox.
Privacy issues
For me, this mess of an inbox would be enough to put me off Buzz, but it gets worse. Google have historically not been great at doing social stuff. They are really great at their core business, which is search and serving ads against those search results. They also excel in some other areas, such as document sharing. And yes, I even appreciate the use of labels instead of folders in Gmail. But social stuff seems to be a bit beyond them.
Google Buzz lays bare Googles social weaknesses, illustrating the lack of thought given to potential social problems caused by their design and engineering decisions.
Privacy problem 1: Google Buzz exposes your most emailed contacts
Nicholas Carlson pointed this out in his Silicon Valley Insider piece, WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Huge Privacy Flaw:
When you first go into Google Buzz, it automatically sets you up with followers and people to follow.
A Google spokesperson tells us these people are chosen based on whom the users emails and chats with most using Gmail.
That’s fine.
The problem is that — by default — the people you follow and the people that follow you are made public to anyone who looks at your profile.
In other words, before you change any settings in Google Buzz, someone could go into your profile and see the people you email and chat with most.
This is a significant problem. I use my Gmail account for business and personal email, so many of my most-emailed people are not my friends but my clients. It’s not appropriate for Google to expose my clients like that. I maintain a client list on my site, but that’s at my discretion and doesn’t give away individual names and email addresses. Google Buzz could.
My email contacts list is not a social graph. It is not a group of people I have chosen to follow, but is instead full of people with whom I have a (sometimes very tenuous)professional relationship, as well as my family and some of my friends. Interestingly, my best friends don’t email me very often, so they do not show up as a part of my Buzz following list.
This answer to this is to go to your Google Profile and uncheck the tickbox next to “Display the list of people I’m following and people following me”.
Didn’t know you had a Google Profile? Nope, me neither! God knows when it was set up, or whether I agreed to it at some point in the past without realising what I was doing, or what. My friend Kevin Marks reminded me that he nagged me into creating a profile when Google first got them, which explains why I forgot all about it! But still, now I know I have a Google Profile I can give it the information I choose to.
Privacy problem 2: Poor default settings and no central control panel
Carlson goes on:
A Google spokesperson asked us to phrase this claim differently. Like this: “In other words, after you create your profile in Buzz, if you don’t edit any of the default settings, someone could visit your profile and see the people you email and chat with most (provided you didn’t edit this list during profile creation).”
This is appalling behaviour by Google. It’s well known that users tend not to edit their default settings. The people currently playing with Buzz may well be early adopters, more experienced in the ways of the web and more curious about settings and defaults. But you can guarantee that most people will accept the default settings as they are, without realising how much information that they are exposing to the world.
When you first join up to Google Buzz, you get a screen that shows you the people you’re automatically following, and who is following you. It doesn’t make clear that this information is visible to others, nor is it clear how to change the settings. If you go to your normal Google settings (at least for me) there is no ‘Buzz’ tab where I can manage all my privacy settings. Instead you have to ferret about in the interface in order to find the different privacy settings.
This is just not good enough. Right now, I can’t even find half the settings that I saw earlier. I found them through clicking on all the links I could see until I got to the page I wanted: This is the sort of usability mistake that Google should not be making.
Privacy problem 3: People can hide themselves from you
One of my followers is anonymous to me.
This is completely appalling. I should be able to see exactly who is following me, and not have them be able to hide themselves from me. The opportunity for abuse here is huge – ex-boyfriends stalking their ex-girlfriends, bosses spying on their employees, random internet trolls watching their victims.
Anyone can get my email address – it’s out there on the web. It has to be, because I’m a freelance consultant and people have to have a way to get hold of me. This means that anyone can hide their profile and I won’t know who they are or why they are following me on Google Buzz. This is creepy in the extreme.
It also means that I can’t block that person. In order to block someone, you need to go to your follower list, click on their name and then click ‘Block’.
If I can’t see a follower’s name, I can’t go to this page and I can’t block them. Huge fail.
Privacy problem 4: Mobile Buzz can publish your precise location, but gives no option to make it fuzzy
If you have a browser on your phone, you may be able to use the mobile version of Buzz. When you open it up, it asks if it can use your location. Say yes to this, and your precise address will be published at the bottom of every Buzz you create. It doesn’t give you a choice in terms of how detailed you want to be, you can’t say ‘London’ or ‘UK’, it just determines your street address to the best of its ability and uses that.
This issue was highlighted by Molly Wood over on Cnet, and is as unhappy about it as I am. Molly has an Android, and her experience was this:
When you first visit the mobile app on your Android phone and attempt to post something, you’ll be asked whether you want to Share Location or Decline. The “Remember this Preference” box is prechecked too, so be sure you’re ready to have everyone know right where you are, whenever you post to Buzz. At minimum, uncheck the Remember button so you can decide whether to reveal your location post by post.
On the iPhone, there’s no “Remember this Preference”, so you are asked every time you open the site. You can turn location on or off on a per-Buzz basis very easily, so it’s not as bad as it sounds like the Android is, but the lack of choice about level of detail is dreadful.
If you do publish your location, you are not just publishing it to those people following you on Buzz, you are also, by default, also publishing it to everyone who is geographically close by. The ‘Nearby’ tab on the mobile Buzz site gives you a list and map view of everyone who has published a location that is within a certain distance. Again, this is fine if that’s what you want, but it shouldn’t be the default. You can, on a per post basis, set your privacy settings to “private”, but you don’t seem able to set that globally via the iPhone.
Once you have published your location you have to delete the Buzz in order to delete your location. You can’t just strip the location off the Buzz.
What’s also annoying is that it asks to use your location every time you open the site up. And every time you open up the Buzz Map. Every time. Lord, that is a real buzz killer.
(Molly flags up some other issues too: The use of photos from her Android that she hadn’t uploaded, and the revelation of her email. Her post is worth reading.)
Privacy problem 5: The opportunities for spammers and PR hacks
Jennifer Leggio has already had PRs spamming her via Buzz (on page 2). Oh dear lord, what a grim thought.
[T]he brand spamming and public relations pitching has already started. It’s bad enough that a lot of these people have my email address, but now they can buzz me just by adding me. (Whether I add them back or not, I found. Was this a glitch?)
The idea that Buzz is going to make me more available to PR people and to spammers, against my will, is not one that fills me with joy. I already get heaps of crap press releases in my inbox, I do not need more of this stuff cluttering things up. The true spammers aren’t there yet, but they will so find a way to abuse Buzz and make the whole thing a horrible experience. And right now, Google seem to be making it easy for them.
Privacy problem 6: Buzz automatically links you to other Google properties like Picasa and Google Reader
Jennifer says:
If you are using Google Picasa and Google Reader yet are not wholly aware of Buzz, you may not realize what you are publishing and promoting to your Buzz stream because you may not know it exists.
Again, would it be so hard to hold off automatically publishing stuff to people’s Buzz streams and make them go through a configuration process before they start publishing anything? Of course, that wouldn’t suit Google, who want as many people to be using Buzz as soon as possible. They don’t have a new tool here, they are just integrating Jaiku, whom they bought in Oct 2007, into Gmail. (Wait! What? It took them over two years to think of this?) So they don’t have a really compelling reason for people to change from Twitter or Facebook or FriendFeed. Buzz is not a killer app, it’s a mess. A TGF.
In conclusion
I haven’t even begun with the usability problems Buzz has. How poorly considered the interface is. How annoying it is when your Buzz stream is flooded with someone’s Google Reader output. But I do have a cure:
Go to the bottom of your screen and click “Turn off Buzz”.
That should pretty much solve the problem. Google can get back to me when they’ve hired someone who actually understands social functionality and, y’know, people, and has fixed the awful usability and privacy problems. As Steve Lawson said:
There’s a reason why I don’t keep a ‘who I’ve emailed this week’ page going on my blog, and it’s not just cos it would be dull as shit.
UPDATE: 12 Feb 2010, 10am
Google have responded very rapidly to users concerns regarding Buzz. In a blog post on the Gmail Blog comes the news that they are making changes to the way that Buzz works and will be rolling those changes out soon.
The changes they are making are:
1. More visible option to not show followers/people you follow on your public profile
2. Ability to block anyone who starts following you
3. More clarity on which of your followers/people you follow can appear on your public profile
My advice to all new Buzz users would be:
- Edit the default list of followers that Buzz suggests when you first join the service. Make sure that you are only following people you want to follow.
- Decide if you want that list to be public. If you are in any way unsure, make it private.
- Keep an eye on who is following you, and use the block functionality if you find someone following you who makes you uncomfortable in any way
- Edit your public profile page and make sure you are happy with the information it displays. The minimum Google will accept is a name.
Having used Buzz already, I can’t check what the defaults are on initial sign-up now, but I’m hoping that Google has made some better choices about default levels of privacy. It would be better if Google doesn’t automatically tie Buzz into its other properties, but asks people to choose that up front. It will certainly be good to be able to see (and block, if I choose) everyone who is following me, not just those with public profiles.
There’s still no word on fuzzy location on the mobile app. My personal preference is not to use geolocation apps, but that’s just my own squickiness. I might use it more if I could set the level of detail in my location, e.g. “London” as opposed to a street address.
Now, if Google gives us the option to spin Buzz off out of our inbox and into a separate app, I might be more inclined to give it another go. But keeping it in the inbox is still a dealbreaker for me. I have enough problems managing my email already, I don’t need Buzz to add to the cognitive load.
I doubt that Google will separate them, though. Just read their opening paragraph where they coo over how many users they have. That’s why they did it like this: It gave them an immediate user base that they probably would not have got if they had launched it as a stand-alone service. My friend Max said to me on Twitter yesterday:
Wave is a separate app that should have been part of GMail, Buzz is part of GMail and should have been a separate app…
And I think he pretty much nailed it there. Buzz still feels uncomfortable in my inbox, but at least Google are making some progress towards clarity and better privacy controls for users. Here’s hoping the solve the other problems soon.
UPDATE: 12 Feb 2010, 1pm
Jessica Dolcourt of Cnet has put together a very clear guide on how to opt-out of Buzz. Turning it off doesn’t purge your profile or stop people following you, so a few more steps are needed.
links for 2010-02-11
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Kevin: Om Malik looks at the CXO mud wrestling match at MySpace. That's old news, and the FT took a deep dive into larger issues at MySpace last month. The really interesting lines in this story deal with whether News Corp is tired of the web and is going to refocus on its high margin businesses. "In many ways, News Corp and Murdoch have lost any and all interest in the web. The fire sales of Photobucket and Rotten Tomatoes are clear indicators that any-and-every digital property is up for sale. I bet if you showed up with a decent offer for say IGN or MySpace, News Corp would be willing to make a deal."
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Kevin: Good post by Robert Hardie asking what newspapers really sell in the age of digital content. Is it the content or the experience? (I might substitute service for experience, but that's largely a semantic distinction.) He says that he paid for the Guardian's iPhone app because he finds the experience superior to viewing the standard mobile site on his iPhone. However, he wonders whether the distinction holds true for regional or local news? He thinks it does.
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Kevin: An interesting bit of comment/blog roundup with some very interesting graphs looking at the costs and the operating margins at Guardian Media Group Regional Media, most of which was just sold to the Trinity Mirror Group. The sickening collapse in 2009 was a predictable result of the Great Recession, but the collapse in earnings started well before then. With the profits shrinking since 2004 while the British property bubble soared, it's hard to see how the predicted return to economic growth (albeit very anemic) will help restore the fortunes of regional newspapers in the UK.
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Kevin: The BBC's Brian Wheeler looks at Twitter and its potential role in the upcoming UK General Election. "Experts … agree: Some hapless candidate will say or do something which will make them an instant, if unwitting, internet star – bringing instant shame and embarrassment to their party." With such risk aversion amongst politicians here in the UK, I don't think it's going to deal with the trust deficit they have after the Paliamentary expenses scandal.
Everything you need to know about comments
Today’s blog post is shamelessly stolen from inspired by Adam Tinworth.
links for 2010-02-10
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Kevin: I'm a member of the Online News Association. It started in the US and still tends to get most of its entries from there, but it's made some strides in showing not only the best international English content but also beginning to highlight some non-English news sites. There is a good mix of blogging, multimedia, breaking news, investigations and technical innovation.
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Suw: Wonderful table of fonts featuring "100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces today."
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Suw: Really great post about the difference between flow and stock as a metaphor for media.
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Suw: Really great post outlining four of the most popular reasons entrepreneurs give for starting their own business, and why it doesn't quite work out like that.